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Sunday, 26 October 2014

The name of
Mohsen Amir-Aslani probably doesn’t mean anything to you. He was executed
recently, aged 37, in Iran where he’d been imprisoned for the last nine years.
He’d been leading sessions reading and interpreting the Qur’an but had been
found guilty of heresy and insulting the prophet Jonah. He had interpreted
Jonah’s story in the Qur’an as a symbolic tale - rather than as the Iranian
religious authorities required, a literal account of a man who’d spent three
days in the belly of a giant fish.

I share this
event with you in sorrow rather than anger, not in the spirit of a polemic
against the wickedness of Iran, or the intolerance of Islamists – there’s a
noxious superabundance of that kind of rhetoric as it is. But my sadness is not
only because of the needless death of one more human being in the name of
so-called ‘religion’, but because of what it tells us – as if we didn’t know –
of the dangers involved in reading religious texts the wrong way. What do I
mean by ‘the wrong way’?

If you are
dong heart surgery, or defusing a bomb, there are manuals filled with very
precise details of what you need to do so as not to kill the patient, or blow
yourself up. Although there is a human element in both procedures - you can do
both carefully or carelessly and the results might be very different - there is
no doubting that the words on the page detailing how you are supposed to
proceed have to be understood literally and followed to the letter if things are
to go well. Interpretation, improvisation, around the text is not forbidden –
but it’s not advisable if you want things to go smoothly, because those are
texts which are written, and ask to be read, withprecise attention given to the plain meaning
of the words. There are right and wrong ways of reading how to proceed in an
operating theatre or while dealing with an unexploded bomb.

We know that
much blood though has been spilled, over the centuries, by those who believed
that religious texts, religious narratives, had to be read as if they were
life-and-death instruction manuals. The belief that they were - and that you
had to read them as if they were - is part of the tragic history of all the
monotheistic faiths. ‘I believe that this book contains the truth because my
religion tells me it is so; my religion tells me that it is so because it has a
book that says it contains God’s truth’ – this is the circular logic of
fundamentalist thinking and it’s a virus that has infected, and continues to
infect in various ways, Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

When Galileo
was hauled before the Inquisition in 1633, accused of heresy because he was
arguing for the Copernican view that the earth moved around the sun – that the
earth was not the central celestial body around which everything revolved – one
of the texts used against him was from the Biblical Book of Joshua, which
contains a narrative where the sun is ordered to stand still. In the sacred
logic of the Inquisition, you’d only command something to stand still if it has
been moving. Therefore the sun must
move round the earth, not the other way about. That had to be true because the
Bible is a holy book that only contains the truth and Galileo’s heresy is clear
when he arrives at a view of the world contrary to what is inscribed in
scripture.

That the
Bible contains elements of storytelling that draw on Middle Eastern myth and
legend, as well as wordplay, puns and all the ingenious literary inventiveness
of their human authors, was a heresy in Christianity at that time, as it still
is in certain strands of Christian thinkin; as it still is in many strands of
Islamic thinking; and is even the case in specific parts of the Jewish world to
this day. The Jewish fundamentalists on the West Bank stake their claim to
Palestinian land on their reading of the Hebrew Bible. The Torah states that
God gave the land to the Israelite people and their descendents for ever – and
although the boundaries of the land vary from text to text in different books
of the Bible, such contradictions are irrelevant to a world view that is not
all that different from those Iranian so-called ‘religious authorities’ – that
the texts are divinely given, and they are true in a literal manner.

And even
though literal interpretations of the Bible were always in Judaism played off
against allegorical readings and homiletical readings, and mystical readings,
even though the plain meaning of texts was always only one of four different
parallel modes of reading and interpreting that all texts inspired - a way of
thinking about texts that made the narrowing down of texts to only one meaning
theoretically impossible – in spite of all this richness of what the tradition
calls ‘midrash’, this midrashic imagination in relation to texts as vehicles
capable of multiple meanings seems quite absent from Jewish fundamentalist
discourse about the land of Israel: the boundaries of that land and who should
live there. This is a betrayal of Jewish thinking - not the first time in
Jewish history it’s happened, but the latest incarnation of it and the one with
the most harmful and destructive consequences attached to it: for the
Palestinians in their daily lives; and for the Jewish people in multiple ways,
not least the integrity of their soul.

Baruch
Spinoza was, famously, excommunicated by the Amsterdam elders of his Sephardic community
for teaching that God was identical with and equivalent to the order which
governs the universe. He wrote about “God, or Nature”, and held that God was
not transcendent, over and above humanity, but that God was a principle of law,
the sum of all the eternal laws in existence; that God was inherent and
imminent in all things, material and spiritual; and that intuition and
spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than the acquisition of
facts. In developing this way of thinking about Judaism he was giving a
philosophical language and framework to what Jewish mystics had been teaching
for centuries, a religion of radical immanence. But out of the mouth of, and
the pen of, this young man, this outsider – he was of Portuguese descent – it was
too much for the religious authorities of the day to accept.

But this
excommunication was his liberation. He was free then to think his own thoughts
and he developedways of thinking
objectively about the Bible – about its historical background and its use of
literary genres – that opened up a whole new historical-critical approach that
fed into the Enlightenment critique of dogmatic religion based on inerrant holy
texts. He made it possible for us to think about ways in which religious texts
contain truths which are psychologically rich, morally true - or morally
complex - to think about the symbolism of texts, to use texts creatively,
imaginatively, not for their eternal claims to truth but as ways of helping us
toward more life-enhancing ways of living rather than ways of living that are
imaginatively impoverished, or intellectually reductive.

So we can
read this week’s Torah narrative of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9) as a
parable about human omnipotence and presumption – about the urge to have bigger
and better, and the limitations of this way of thinking. Or we can read it as a
parable about the problematic nature of having only one dominant language -
whether it the language of fascism, or communism, or neo-liberalism: God looks
down and says, as it were, ‘when everyone is united in one way of speaking or
thinking there’s trouble ahead’. Mono-dimensional thinking breads fanaticism.
The way forward is through multiplicity – many languages, many ways of thinking:
pluralism. Babel, like Jonah, are mythic narratives: if they have truth in them
it is not the truth of literalism but the truth of the imagination.

How often it
is that it’s the so-called heretic, the outsider, who comes along and shakes up
the tradition into new and interesting shapes, who liberates a religion’s
imagination when it gets stuck, as it does – that’s what the Baal Shem Tov did in
eastern Europe a hundred years after Spinoza, when he started that religious
revivalist movement known as Hasidism (and he had probably never heard of
Spinoza). That energy from the outside has stirred up Jewish thinking over and
over again, often resisted by the powers-that-be (Hasidic leaders were often banned
from preaching by their Mitnagdim opponents well into the 19th
century). So, to adapt a phrase, blessed are the troublemakers, new
interpreters, language players – they keep religion alive, fresh, on its toes. Blessed
are the myth-rakers, myth-makers, risk-takers – they keep religion from going
stale. They keep us honest.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on October 25th 2014. Some ideas in this sermon are indebted to Alan Wall, who shared with me a text of his entitled 'Bad Reading Habits'; texts also consulted include Karen Armstrong's 'A History of God' and 'The Bible: the Biography'.]

Thursday, 9 October 2014

Justas the lulav
that we use on the festival of Sukkot is made up of three different trees -
palm, myrtle and willow - I want to reflect on three films I’ve seen in recent
months, bind them together for this season – and see if I can add in that exotic etrog element along the way.

The first, Ida, is still on at selected cinemas in
the UK. Made in exquisite black-and-white by the Polish-born director,
PawelPawlikowski, (who’s lived in
England for many years and developed a successful film and TV career here), in this film we see him returning to his
historical roots. Set in his homeland, the film opens in a convent where Anna,
a trainee nun, is shown immersed in the devotion and calm and austerity of the
enclosed Catholic order which has been her world since infancy - having come
there as an orphan. We see the rhythms of daily life and the contained
stillness of Anna, and there’s little dialogue until Anna is told by her strict
mother superior that she needs to visit her only relative, an aunt whom she has
never met, before she takes her final vows freely, once she’s had some contact
with the outside world.

Inside the convent there is a
kind of timelessness, it’s an ordered and unchanging world, but outside we see
a Poland grey and bleak, immersed in the rigours of early 1960s Stalinism, with
material impoverishment intertwined with spiritual impoverishment – her aunt,
Wanda, has been a local judge dispensing state-approved justice to the
perceived enemies of communism, but is now a hard-drinking, chain-smoking,
sexually amoral woman approaching her middle years and burdened, we gradually
find, by secrets and regrets and an unassuageable pain connected with her past,
and indeed the past of her country.

I am not going to give away
too much of the plot, because I urge you to see this masterly gem of a film for
yourself, but as the film proceeds you see how much of Poland’s past is buried
(figuratively and literally) under the surface of daily life. Within the
anonymous Catholic habit that Anna wears it turns out there is a young woman
who has not known that she is Jewish – Ida Lebenstein, hidden after the murder
of her parents during the War.

And inside the louche aunt who
becomes determined to track down where Ida’s parents were killed and buried, is
a woman embittered by the failures of her own youthful ideological commitment
to communism,a woman haunted by the
unbearable knowledge that because of her commitment to the Polish anti-Nazi
resistance, she’d left her child with her sister, Ida’s mother, only for the
boy to be killed along with Ida’s parents.

As in Claude Lanzmann’s epic
1985 documentary Shoah, we are shown the
post-War denial by those who took over Jewish homes and property about having
any knowledge of anything to do with the past: although this film’s narrative
is fictional, it is also a slice of history. Through the story of these two
women (each isolated in their own way) we are seeing the story of a nation – it
becomes a sort of parable – and it’s wonderfully done, with a Biblical economy
of storytelling: sparse, fragmented, a national morality tale told, like the
stories of Genesis, through characters interacting, where there is a certain
indeterminacy of meaning, and gaps in the information provided, and moral
judgements about good and evil are suspended or called into question, and yet
the whole story hangs together in a psychologically true way.

We note the name,
‘Lebenstein’ – life is as hard as stone, as unyielding as the Catholic faith
that both contributed through its theology to the anti-semitism of Poles, yet
occasionally helped save them. And as unyielding as the communism that overtook
post-War Poland, with Jewish enthusiasts for the state’s communist idealism
taking up leadership roles out of all proportion to their surviving numbers.

Our sukkah, humble in its
fragility and impermanence, stands in stark contrast to the monumental rigidity
of ideological regimes, whether pre-Vatican II Catholicism or post-War
Euro-Stalinism, both of which demanded a submission to authorities who thought
they knew what is best for people. But the sukkah, open to the elements, is a
reminder of our vulnerability - which is a truth about the human condition
mirrored in a film that shows how the dramas of history also expose our human
vulnerability. Between 1939 and 1945 Poland lost a fifth of its population,
including 3 million Jews. Through the story of Ida and Wanda, the film shows us
the human costs of this harsh history - but it’s crafted and filmed by artists
who know that you can only speak of the true horrors and burdens of the past
elliptically, glimpsing from an angle what is unbearable to look at full on.

Ida is not
another ‘Holocaust film’. And it’s as far from Hollywood as you can get. It’s a
small masterpiece of narrative filmic art that’s not just about Poland and its
history, but about universal questions of justice and indifference, God and
godlessness, innocence and guilt, love and hate, meaning and meaninglessness,
and how complex the relationship between these apparent opposites actually is.

My second film occupies very
different terrain and is exactly twice the length of Ida’s pared down 80 minutes. But it’s equally wondrous. You may
well have seen it, or at least read
about it: Boyhood by Richard
Linklater, who made those three interlinked movies between 1995 and 2013,
‘Before Sunrise’, ‘Before Sunset’, and ‘Before Midnight’, eachwith Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy,tracing the relationship of the couple over nearly
two decades as the characters evolve from carefree youngsters in love with idea
of love towards their middle years of adult complexity, discord and fragmenting
hopes.

In Boyhood though, he has gone one step further. We watch a six year
old child grow up into a college youth, twelve years of life unfolding scene by
modest scene, without much plot, without much story, but filled with the
intimate, everyday stuff of life: quarrels with his sister, a harassed working
mother, her partners changing over time, step-children appearing then
disappearing, changing technology, changing hairstyles, clothes, schools, music
of each era from Britney Spears in the 1990s up till today, the craze for Harry
Potter, the constant background growl of politics on TV, Clinton, the Iraq War,
Obama. Episodes from a life.

But all the time that you are
watching, although it’s a fictional scenario you are aware that it is the same
actors evolving over time. Because this was Linklater’s vision. Like Michael
Apted’s famous 7-Up documentaries here in the UK, tracing the lives of a group
of British children from 1957 to the present, Linklater has done the seemingly
impossible. He’s filmed a boy growing up, arranging for the cast to come
together fora few weeks each year, so
although we know the actors are acting we also know that this is really them
aging, year after year. And although you see it in the boy Mason’s parents, you
see it most obviously in Mason himself as he grows in front of your eyes from
boyhood to adulthood. Not different child actors, but the transformation over
160 minutes of 12 years of real life. And the pathos is in seeing the
irreversible nature of time passing and people aging – and it sounds obvious,
that we all get older year by year, and you might not think it would make a
very compelling film, but it does (although I know some people found it
boring).

It strikes me that it is the
film equivalent of the text from Ecclesiastes that we read on Sukkot, that
festival of rest amidst the desert wanderings: ‘For everything there isa season, anda time for every experience under the heavens: a time to be born and a
time to die, a time for planting and a time for uprooting... a time for weeping
and a time for laughing, a time for seeking and a time for losing, a time for
silence and a time for speaking...’ But whereas there is a sceptical voice in
that Biblical book that says ‘Yes, and there is nothing new under the sun’,
Linklater turns that on its head and says ‘No, everything is new under the sun, every day of your life – if you
have eyes to see it...’

Linklater has given us a
master class in holding the everyday sacred, and in how life is lived holding
the tension between, or veering off between, opposite experiences, as the
Ecclesiastestext evokes; but nothing is
repeated - there is just evolution over time, and the chance to make the best
of it we can, day by day, year by year, shaping our own lives and being shaped
by life. It may not sound as if this amounts to very much as a film, but as
Mason grows in front of our eyes - as in time-lapse photography - we accumulate
moments that build into something deeply satisfying, joyous and life-enhancing.

Which takes me to my third
film, which is perhaps the opposite ofjoyous and life-enhancing: it is painful and kind of soul-destroying,
but utterly necessaryto see. Certainly
if you want to have any credibility when talking about Israel and its history
over the last 60 plus years in relation to the Palestinians, then it is a vital
document for our times. Over the summer - it was actually during the latest
Gaza war - I caught up with the 2012 Oscar-nominated Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers. (As it happens, in the
UK it’s on BBC2 this Saturday night, October 11th, followed by a Newsnight discussion).

Director Dror Moreh interviews
six retired heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret security service, who speak
with surprising openness, frankness, about the ways in which their concern for
Israel’s security saw them in constant tension with the political leadership of
the State, who consistently failed to make the necessary compromises and
strategic decisions which could have led to a more peaceful co-existence
between the people who share this tiny strip of land. The accumulating
narrative of archive footage and military footage interspersed with these
voices is disturbing, devastating – and the section on how the Shin Bet foiled
Jewish terrorist plots to blow up the Dome of the Rock is hair-raising.

These men are not
bleeding-heart liberals, ‘lefties’. They are men with blood on their
hands:hard, hard men, living with the
ambiguities and complexities of real life, everyday life, dealing with Arab
terrorists and Jewish fanatics, trying to find pragmatic responses to
chauvinism, zealotry and the wilful self-righteousness of those who – for
religious or political reasons – believe, know, they have right on their side,
and want to force it onto others, even unto death.We know all about Palestinian murderousness,
butI’d forgotten the rabid hatred in
Israel that preceded the murder of Yitzchak Rabin, the one leader who was
prepared to compromise for the sake of peace; the poisonous atmosphere in which
he was harangued as a traitor, compared to Hitler, with the Shin Bet fearful
for his security but unable to persuade him to wear bulletproof protection when
he addressed political gatherings. History turns on such decisions, on the
pride of a man, on the naivety of a man who couldn’t believe that Jews would
murder their own prime minister.

The reviewer of this film in Ha’aretz – who described watching it as
like ‘a waterboarding of the soul’ – bemoaned the way that in Israel, following
the release of the film, these six retired old men, aging men, ‘who were once
considered heroes’ were nowbeing ‘labelled
traitors, because they dare cry out that the emperor has no clothes’. Perhaps
the most poignant moment comes near the end when one of them says, quietly,
simply: ‘We win every battle, but lost the war.’ If you haven't seen it, catch it this weekend, if you can. It’s a
necessary film, and one in a curious way that is linked in subterranean ways to
the story of Ida, and the way history – and in this case the history of the
years between 1939 and 1945 – is still alive and toxic and infiltrates daily
life in often unseen ways, andcertainly
reverberates in the Israeli psyche up till today.

Life is fragile – we say it
again and again. It is at the heart of Sukkot. Life is transient, it’s open to
the elements that rain down on us, and that can sweep us away. And yet in the tradition we call Sukkot ‘Zman Simchatenu’ – ‘the season of our
rejoicing’. Because life, with all its starkness and uncertainty, is also a
blessing: like the etrog with the lulav, the wonderful smell lingers in our
nostrils, and we can appreciate how, as our lives unfold moment by precious
moment, year by precious year, joyfulness is also grafted to our souls. In
spite of everything that is antithetical to life, we can and do experience
wonder and goodness; there is, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘a time for wailing – and
a time for dancing’. On this festival, may our souls dance to the beat of life.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the morning of the first day of Sukkot, October 9th, 2014]